Two Left Hands: Deconstructing Transness as a Crisis of Identity in SFF Fiction

Modern transgender existence has long held a link with a state of crisis. This paper challenges the assumption that to be trans is to inherently be in crisis, or that crisis is an internal force working upon the trans body. Through a close reading of two science fiction/fantasy texts, Linsey Miller's Mask of Shadows (2017) and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, this paper argues that crisis is an external force imposed upon the trans body by mainstream society and can be relieved through a social model of accessibility. By examining the unfixed state of gender within the texts and within modern queer and gender theories, this paper argues that the sense of crisis experienced by the trans community is also unfixed, and therefore a world beyond this state of crisis is possible.